Hempuli's blog

So! Another year has passed. After 2022’s productivity, 2023 followed more on the footsteps of 2020 and 2021 in that I got very very few games released. However, this comparison feels somewhat unfair because I was still working on multiple projects throughout the year, and Mobile Suit Baba was the fruit of those efforts, ending up being quite a bit more ambitious than I initially planned. I also worked on Noita again, adding some more content. Thanks to Petri & Olli for letting me do that!

2023 also saw me getting into boardgame development more seriously. I’ve been dabbling with trying to make my own boardgames/cardgames since childhood (I have about 5 different imitations of Magic: the Gathering & the Pokémon Trading Card Game I made back then stashed in a cupboard), and Petri Purho (from the Nolla Games team) and Erik Svedäng (developer of Blueberry Garden & Else Heart.break()) inspired me further by making boardgames at various game jams. However, during adulthood I’ve never really gotten past the initial stages of design due to impatience, lack of skill, and other factors. Me and Petri developed 2 boardgames together somewhere around 2013, but the first time I got close to actually releasing something was with Piiri in 2020, although that too went unfinished at the time.

Considering the above, me being able to develop so many boardgames to a state where I felt confident enough to put them available online last year felt really nice! Mostly the boardgame design motivation came from procrastination regarding videogame development, but I can’t complain too much about that since the end result was still creative work being done on something I was happy with. The impatience and lack of skill are still present, though, and as such my boardgames have stayed very carefully in the land of 2-player abstracts. Maybe this year I’ll go further?

2023 was also the year of books for me. I started trying to read more in 2022, and once the habit was formed, it was great to get through a lot of new stuff after years and years of re-reading the sam books over and over. In total I read 24 titles last year, although some were very short affairs.

Anyway, here’s the total list of stuff I released last year:

• Baba Files Taxes
• Cylinders of the Wise
• Obsidian Sentinels
• Malsymmetric (technically unfinished because I wasn’t happy with the design)
• Equal measures (paper puzzle)
• Piiri (mostly designed in 2020)
• Kepi
• Elder Dance (technically unfinished because the rules were broken)
• Kurote
• Gnome Thicket
• DIAGORT
• Flatdog Scuffle
• Mobile Suit Baba
• LITSilly (paper puzzle)

Last but not least, 2023 was also the year I finally got a pet, although a better term might be that a pet was got-ed at me. Vilma has been getting more used to me and my apartment, and lately I seem to have figured out what kind of scratching she likes, and she has also started to spend more time lying next to me while I sleep. It’s funny how years-long plans to get a dog turned out like this. Oh well!

For 2024, I have plans to try to release more tiny games like in 2022. However, ESA 2 and Planet Keke are on the table still and especially ESA 2 needs all the attention I can give, so I’ll have to be mindful of that when I decide to dedicate time to sideprojects. I’m sure something’ll work out, though.

Off to a new year we go!

I added A Solitaire Mystery, boardgames and Mobile Suit Baba to the games lists. I also added a separate page for listing the various social media sites I’m currently active on.

I also added LITSilly to the paper puzzle collection.

Ooh, a new paper puzzle type to close off the year! Yay!

Puzzles:

I decided on a mostly-whim to export this tiny 2008 escape room game to HTML5, since it seemed fairly trivial and since despite the game’s simplicity I have some fondness for it. Anyway, I did end up having to do some additional work to get the thing rendering at double resolution, but whatever. The game’s likely to take less than 10 minutes to finish.

PLAY ON ITCH.IO

In other news, all but one of the Limited Alike puzzles in my WPC post below were outdated, broken versions; I’ve now updated them all, as well as added a Celltinels puzzle I had missed into the post.

Last year I was given the opportunity to make some paper puzzles for the World Puzzle Championship, held in Poland. It was suggested that out of the genres I’ve come up with, Celltinels and Limited Alike might be the best suited for the job, so I ended up making 4 puzzles of varying difficulties for both genres (and an extra Celltinels puzzle for reasons I’m slightly hazy about – I think it was an alternative version of the 3rd puzzle in the set in case the first one was too hard or too easy?) This was really cool and I’m happy I was asked to make them! Thanks! I also do hope that my kinda happy-go-lucky approach to puzzle design didn’t cause too much stress…

There was a one-year embargo on releasing the puzzles outside the event, and that has now passed so after seeing the fellow puzzle designer Menderbug release theirs, I thought I’d go ahead and do the same.

First, here are the rules for both genres as reminders:

Note! The clue numbers block the “vision” of other clues!

And here are the puzzles:

First of all, I made another little comic!

Second of all, I went and updated the website so that there are no more imgur links in the game screenshots; I noticed that some of those links had died and it made sense to go for entirely local images. I should eventually also add local download links for those games that only offer an Itch.io link, I think. We’ll see. I also shuffled the games around a bit because I felt that some notably tiny games were in the “medium games” category and vice versa. Also some games graduated to the “big games” category! I should really rethink the category system altogether…

Third of all, the paper puzzle collection has been updated with the latest puzzle types like Equal measures and Diagaquarium.

Fourth of all – I made Masjin available again! The server’s still dead, but at least you can download the game (and the server hosting tool is likewise available again).

Fifth and final of all, have some screenshots of the games I’m working on:

I made an extremely juvenile 6-page comic called Wasserkloset Destiny:Ultra! You can read it here: https://www.hempuli.com/comic/?title=comics&id=7

My birthday was a couple days ago and a friend made me a cool birthday Baba card! It’s cool!

I’ve also updated the Paper Puzzle collection with the Equal measures puzzles, as well as a new Diagaquarium puzzle. You can see that below alongside another new Equal measures puzzle.

Hey, it’s been a while since I put out a new paper puzzle type! This one is apparently very close to various other types, especially Belarusian snake; I’m quite happy with how the puzzles feel!

And the puzzles:

New paper puzzle type! I think this one is relatively elegant but explaining the rules still feels like a pain, haha. I hope the writeup makes sense.

And thus:

UPDATE: The third puzzle should now *actually* work. Sorry!!